While watching Nick Griffin and representatives of the three mainstream political parties scramble to be the heirs of Churchill's political legacy on last week's Question Time, I was struck by a thought about Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke – a controversial and flawed book that nevertheless had the courage to question some of our wartime leader's motives – and the relationship between literature and politics. Human Smoke is a history book, but Baker is a novelist, and perhaps brings a novelist's sensibility to the layered decision-making and often unjust motivations for the winning of a just war. Do novelists understand human nature implicitly better than politicians? Or are they just given the space to explore it more fully?

My own novel, Heartland, takes place during local council elections in which the BNP threaten to take the seat of Jim Bayliss, a veteran Labour councillor. This conversation between Rob, the councillor's nephew, and his friend Lee, is adapted from the book:

Rob: Have yer even voted before?

Lee: Once…I voted for Blair when he got in. A lot o good thass done, look.

Rob: But yow cor vote for the BNP… iss racist.

Lee: I am a racist.

As I hope you can hear from the accents, the novel is set in Dudley, my hometown, and deals with racial and religious tensions in the build-up to the 2002 World Cup as well as a bitter local election campaign. The Black Country, and areas like it, are really still trying to recover from the massive upheavals caused by the collapse (or destruction) of manufacturing industry that began in the 1980s. The town I grew up in changed utterly between my earliest memories and my teens. I think the roots of the current far-right crisis lie in these years.

Heartland is a novel, not a political tract, but what I tried to do in Lee and Rob's conversation was explore the mentality of voters currently abandoning Labour to vote for the far right. In writing Heartland, I had to ask myself whether some of the characters I portray appear to justify support for the BNP (something I personally believe to be reprehensible). The fact is, though, that these people and these problems exist. With very rare exceptions (Shane Meadows's This is England, for example, and the novels of David Peace) these areas of English society are unexplored.

The issues I had to wrestle with, it seems to me, were similar to some of the questions the BBC had to pose itself in inviting Nick Griffin on to Question Time: chiefly, whether or not allowing ideas to be voiced and interrogated somehow gives them credence. In some ways I had an easier job. The novel is perhaps a better form to explore some of these issues in depth than the fevered atmosphere of a panel discussion.

Some of the million-odd people that voted for the BNP in the far right's most recent resurgence are, like Lee, unrepentant extremists. "We'll always be here," claim characters on both sides of a political divide in Heartland. However, the BNP's values are not shared by a million people in this country. For every character like Lee in Heartland and the shadowy figures that appear in the background when the election begins to look close, I wanted to acknowledge that there are others like councillor Jim's cousin Nancy and her husband Wes: lifelong Labour voters who suddenly show a BNP election poster in their window. These people are lost, angry, ignored, but not extremists. Sidelining or attempting to silence Griffin plays straight into the BNP's hands, because what he and his party have done so well is to reach out to a group of people that already feel silenced, marginalised, ridiculed, and claimed to give them a voice.

In many ways the programme was a sideshow, not a Christmas present. Nick Griffin was exposed pretty much for what, underneath his spin at the BBC or in back-street pubs in run-down towns, he is: a racist. But the people who voted BNP haven't disappeared. That so many people feel so blind with rage that they can be duped into a vote for the far right is something that the mainstream parties – particularly the Labour Party – need to engage with and combat pretty urgently. There are sections of society that feel abandoned by Labour. Enter the BNP. This is not an excuse for those votes, but, as I tried to do in Heartland, an attempt to explain them.

It is one of fiction's jobs to observe, explore and attempt to understand all aspects of human behaviour, no matter how offensive to us they might be. This is true from Dostoyevsky to Martina Cole. I wanted Heartland to attempt this with regard to the complex motivations a person might have for voting for the BNP. Because for all we try to simplify the issue, like all human behaviour it is complicated; for every Lee, there are confused, angry people like Nancy. And this is something, perhaps, that literature can convey more clearly than an hour of Question Time.